Random Thoughts - August 15

1) I think Jackson has completely moved past saying "Di-da" ... he almost always says "Dillon" at this point

2) The boys are just now starting to understand the concept of a letter having a "name"/sound - for the longest time they would identify letters by the word they knew - so A was always "Alba", B was baby, C was Colter, etc. They probably knew 15-20 letters like that. Just recently, they will call a letter by it's name. Jackson is a little better than Dill - he probably knows 5 or so. N, A, D, J, B.

3) For a while, Dillon has been discriminating against the numbers 3,4, and 5. When asked to count something, he would always go "1, 2, 6, 7, 8...". Tonight for the first time in a long time he independently counted correctly, including 3,4,5! Now, he still likes to over-count (so if a picture has 5 ducks, he'll either count to 4 or to 7, etc.), but he's also getting a little better at that. Jackson is pretty good - if the items are laid out fairly evenly (as opposed to in a jumble) he can usually accuratley count up to 9 or 10.

4) The night-time routine when daddy reads bedtime stories is now as follows: (a) read one or two books, (b) sing the three standard songs - "A, B, C, D", Baby Beluga, and Rockabye Baby, (c) have Mommy put the boys to bed. The boys have more recently been singing along almost all of the words with me, especially Dillon (sometimes Jackson just likes to make noises to the tune of the words and squirm a lot). As soon as the last song is done, the boys immediately get down from my lap and run to the top of the stairs where they shout "Annabel! Mommy! I want put Mommy to bed!"

Jackson wore some underpants this afternoon and didn't have any accidents. He even went to the bathroom a couple of times after Mommy prompted him. Some solid steps in the right direction!!!